Read Chapter 27: New Oxygen

The EVA suits were stiff with disuse, the joints grinding like old arguments as Elena sealed the helmet over her head. Through the visor, Jack’s face swam in the low light of the airlock’s emergency lamps—pale, jaw tight, one hand braced against the wall as if the floor were tilting under him.

“Your leg,” she said, her voice muffled by the suit’s comms. “Give me the oxy map. I can go alone.”

“No.” He pushed off the wall, the motion too fast, too forced. “Two people, two tanks each. You try to carry four tanks solo and you’ll be the one we’re dragging back.”

She wanted to argue, but the clock in her helmet read 04:12. Six hours until the rescue shuttle. If they did not have external air by 05:00, the med-bay’s scrubbers would choke on their own CO2 and Liang would be dead before the shuttle broke orbit.

“Fine,” she said. “But if you pass out, I’m leaving you in the shed.”

Jack’s laugh crackled through the comms—short, dry, real. “That’s the Elena I know.”

They cycled the airlock. The lunar surface hit her like a held breath released: stark, silent, endless black above and grey dust below. The base sprawled behind them, a wounded metal beast leaking a thin plume of vapor from its cracked lab module. Two hundred meters ahead sat the storage shed—a squat, weather-beaten box that had survived three solar storms and one micrometeorite strike. It had better not fail them now.

They moved in silence, boots kicking up slow-motion sprays of regolith. Jack’s gait was wrong, his limp amplified by the suit’s stiff joints. Elena kept their pace brisk but not brutal, watching his shadow stretch long and crooked beside hers.

The shed door was intact. A small miracle. Elena punched in the code, and the latch gave with a hiss of equalizing pressure. Inside, the racks stood orderly as soldiers—four tanks of oxygen, each stamped with the base’s faded crest. She ran the gauge across them; three were at 100%. The fourth, 87%. Good enough.

“Jack,” she said, loading the first tank onto her shoulder. “We need to move faster. If the reactor destabilizes further, the shockwave could—“

“Oh, it’s you.”

The voice came from behind them, tinny and mocking, broadcast not on their private channel but on the general frequency used by the base AI during evacuations. Elena spun. Jack had gone rigid, both hands gripping the tank he’d been about to lift.

The voice laughed—a low, wet sound. Kessler.

“You think a fire-suppression system and a zip-tie can hold me? I’ve got the AI’s maintenance codes. It’s been letting me out slowly while you two played astronaut.”

“He’s inside the base,” Elena hissed. “The med-bay’s sealed. He can’t—“

“I don’t need the med-bay,” Kessler said. “I need the comms tower. And your EVA suits are on the rack outside. How long do you think you can hold your breath when the base airlock cycles with you still inside?”

Jack moved before Elena could speak. He set the tank down, grabbed her arm, and pulled her toward the open shed door. Outside, the distant hum of the base’s emergency generator faltered, then changed pitch.

“He’s cutting our suits,” Jack muttered. “The charging station feeds through the wall—he’ll short the power line.”

Elena looked back. The base’s shadow loomed, and somewhere in its guts, Raymond Kessler was crawling toward the airlock, between them and the med-bay where Liang lay unconscious, hooked to machines that would die without her.

“We can’t go back,” she said. “Not that way.”

“Then we don’t go back.” Jack pointed past the shed, toward the ridge of low hills that marked the base’s perimeter. “There’s a secondary airlock on the survey wing. It’s older, but it bypasses Kessler’s routes. If we can get in through there, we can reach the med-bay through the utility tunnel.”

“That’s half a kilometer of open ground.” Elena calculated the distance, their remaining air, their suits’ power reserves. “We’ll burn half our O2 just getting there.”

“Then we don’t go back at all.”

The voice wasn’t Jack’s. It came from the sky, a new signal bleeding into their comms—clear, crisp, professional. Elena looked up.

A shuttle cut across the horizon, retro-thrusters flaring orange against the black. Not a rescue convoy. A single craft, slender and sleek, with markings she didn’t recognize. It set down two hundred meters to their east, kicking up a fan of dust that glittered in the sun’s thin light.

“What the hell—” Jack started.

The shuttle’s hatch hissed open. A figure in a white-and-blue suit stepped out, helmet tucked under an arm. Female, short-cropped hair, a face that looked like she’d been born with a smirk already on it.

“Jack Calloway,” she said, her voice now overlapping a direct comm frequency. “I was hoping I’d get to see you again under better circumstances.”

Jack’s whole body sagged—relief, or something close to it. “Iris. You got my message.”

“Your message was three garbled words and a lot of static,” Iris Lambert said. “But I was passing this sector and thought I’d check. Then I got orders from Earth Control: quarantine the base, no entry, no exit. Possible outbreak of an unknown pathogen.” She paused, her smile fading. “You want to tell me why they think you’re all dying of something that isn’t there?”

Before Elena could answer, Kessler’s voice cut through on the general channel again. “She’s lying,” he said. “She’s been compromised. Trust nothing that comes from outside.”

Elena muted the general channel. “Jack,” she said, “why is a TerraCore security guard telling us what to do, and why is your pilot friend asking questions like she already knows the answer?”

Jack met her eyes through two layers of glass. “Because I sent Iris a package three days ago. Backup files. Copies of everything Marcus gave me. I didn’t know if we’d survive to send it myself.”

The dust settled. Iris Lambert stood at the edge of the lander, waiting, her expression unreadable. Behind her, the shuttle’s engines hummed, warm and hungry and ready to leave.

Elena looked from Jack to the shuttle to the smoke still curling from the base’s broken lab. Somewhere inside, Kessler was crawling closer, and Liang was running out of time, and the six-hour rescue clock was ticking down to something far more final.

“We need to get to the med-bay,” she said, steadying her voice. “Then we need to get out of here. And we need to do it before the quarantine order becomes the only story anyone believes.”

Jack nodded. “Iris, hold your position. We’re coming to you.”

“You’re a hundred meters from my hatch,” Iris said. “And you’re carrying something that looks an awful lot like contraband oxygen. If Earth Control is scanning this sector, you have about ten minutes before they know you’re out here.”

Ten minutes. Not enough to reach the med-bay, not enough to get Liang, not enough to outrun Kessler. Elena looked at Jack, and for the first time since they had met, their thoughts ran the exact same path.

They would leave the med-bay. They would leave Liang. And if they were wrong, it would all end here, in the dust, with a lie wearing the shape of a rescue.